Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday February 15, 1999 @04:03PM
from the if-you-can't-beat-'em dept.

Kolin the Anonymous Coward writes "
Ign reports that the new anti-piracy protection on Final
Fantasy VIII (the most hyped game of 99) has already been
cracked three times over. Pirates wanting to copy the games
onto cdr disks or to play the imported game have already found
three solution to sony's new security featured on FF VIII
and slated to be on many more games. These methods include a
software crack applied before the game is put onto cdrs, a
new "phantom" chip which can be easilly soldiered into any
playstation and use of a hardware cheat device called gameshark. "
I obviously don't support pirating games you don't own, but
I this is interesting- it seems that the era of copy protection
is at an end. And maybe this will help eliminate that obnoxious lag
time before we get the cool games on this side of the pond.

I think that unless a person cannot afford a program like photoshop they shuld pay for it. I can understand a student wanteing to expand his/her skills with usefull software, even if it is usually expensive. So in that instance I understand why people pirate. There is no reason, however, to pirate games. They are not expensive, they are a luxery, and if you can't afford them you sholdn't be worrying about games anyway. Just my $.02

The person who copies the software isn't breaking the license agreement, since he never entered into it. He is breaking copyright law, which states he may not make copies without permission from the copyright holder.

Many of the dongle based protections systems are really easy to crack. There are a couple howtos on cracking dongle based security. Some of the stupier dongle systems just do a simple hardware check to see if the thing is attached to the system.

Well, that's what this is - a hardware based security mechanism, and one that's obviously not too secure. It checks to see if a mod chip has been installed in the PSX, and if so, refuses to play.

OTOH, some of the systems seem pretty secure. Has anyone ever heard of someone cracking a WIBU dongle? That system encrypts the software and then decrypts it using hardware not software.

I don't know much about dongles, but it would seem possible, at least in theory. Somebody with a lot of hardware knowledge (or info on the specs) would have to reverse-engineer the dongle to determine the encryption mechanism, then write software to decrypt it in software, thus removing the need for the hardware decryption.

More companies don't use them because they're only feasible for *really* high-end programs. If somebody has a $3000 auto-CAD program, and their box only does auto-CAD, they may not mind a dongle. However, if i use some $500 program about 1/4 of the time, and another $500 program some of the time, I'm going to run out of ports, and switching dongles constantly when I want to use a different program is going to get really old really fast. Not to mention that if it's a parallel port dongle I have to take it off to use my printer.

I'm no accountant but it seems to me that if games company would sell their games 10 to 20$ instead of a bloated 50 to 80$, a LOT more people would buy them and would rather spend a *reasonable* for a complete nice and colorful package instead of a cheapo cd burned version with photocopied instructions.

I believe that if they didn't spend any $$$ on fancy copy protections and concentrated instead on making a game worth buying. They'd make the same amount of money selling a game 20$ because more people would buy it, and piracy would practically be ubsolete.

Umm. There are programs that generate fake credit card numbers. They've been floating around for years now. Also a cracker can easily beat this by using stolen credit card numbers to produce the key. All it takes is for one credit card number to be accepted

The reason for all the "piracy HOWTOs" articles as you put it is that a lot (if not the vast majority) of the posters here on Slashdot know that despite what the industry claims,and what you see printed in the Ziff-Davis magazines this kind of "security/protection" is a big joke. Read an article in PC MAG (or any other Windows mag) telling you how safe and secure e-commerce is? *DON'T YOU BELIVE IT* The crackers are sitting back and laughing their heads off at you.

- Seen a red box - Used blue/red box tones through my C64 (Phoneman, was it?) - Ran a BBS for 2-3 years on my C64 with C-Net for a while, then ImageBBS soft., about 2-3 years on my PC w/ Synchronet BBS soft. - Was a FidoNET coordinator for my city for about 18 months when I was 17 years old (FIDO didn't suck too too bad though coordinator politics really were shitty. )

So yep, I was there in the 'old days'.. My first modem was a 300 baud in 1988, when I was 10 years old, my 1200 baud came in 1989... blue boxing was the thing when I was 11-13 years old (before Bell busted a bunch of people in my hometown)...etc Of course, I'm older now & realize that that stuff really "isn't" cool in the grand scheme of things - it's just playing chicken with the law & Bell's incompetency.

Sony's protection scheme also includes (stupid) region locking like DVDs. For example, Japanese games (real ones, not CDR pirated ones) won't play on a US playstation and vice-versa. The only way around this is to (1) Buy a playstation from each region, or (2) Modify 1 playstation so it can play games from all regions. (2) is simpler, cheaper and still legal, stupid legislators notwithstanding. Lawyers make the engineers come up with all this region stuff. I am not a pirate. I pay for my imports and just want to play cool games now and not wait for a local port, which for lots of games, may never happen at all. Tokimeki Memorial is the US? It'll never happen.

BTW, am I alone in thinking that if the CD audio format were just being released now that it would have some sort of region lock-out scheme?

You're OBVIOUSLY not one of the masses (in this case, 2,000,000 people who PREORDERED the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 8. I'm not one of them, but believe me, my name will be all over the US list) addicted beyond repair to the Final Fantasy Series. Unfortunatley for me I'm an American, living in America, understanding only English, Latin (kinda-sorta) and sign language, so I don't get the good stuff fast.

But if I knew even 3 or 4 words in Japanese, I'd GLADLY pay $100 for FF8, $70 for the mod chip (or $40 for a Game Shark), or hell even another $100+ for a Japanese Playstation, and the adaptors required (I can hook the damned thing up to my PC if all else fails. Gotta love NTSC and PAL compatibility).

The Final Fantasy series to video game RPGamers is sort of like what the Quake series is to the FPShooter. It defines the genere. However, our genere is MUCH harder to produce games for, no less GOOD games. Square has this down to an art in my opinion (and the 8,000,000+ others who own FF7, the 2,000,000 who already own 8, the 5,000,000+ who own FF3 (US release, I think 5 in Japan), etc...

Again, in summary, YES, he's paying $96 for the game, $79 for a Mod Chip, $70 for the US release (yes, $70. Not $20. This game had what, a 2-3 million dollar budget?)...

You'd probably end up falling asleep if put in front of FF8, unless you appreciate a great, long story (eg 100+ hours depending on how fast you go through things. At least 40).

As for the popularity and "hype", it's because this type of game is so rarely done well. Many think the series sucks, but obviously many disagree (myself included). As the person above this post says, appreciation of Console RPGs is aquired (I started in on Dragon Warrior, when Nintendo Power was giving it away free with a subscription. I'm only 17, so this is ancient to me...).

Being a FPShooter player, you probably won't like the RPGames very much... The combat tends to be only a distraction to keep the game from becoming an interactive movie.

You probably wouldn't like the Final Fantasy series... It's basically a movie with interactions that semi determine the order (not course) of events. That's the only thing I don't like about these games... You basically have no say in how things happen. But I guess it'd be quite difficult to write a game with so many endings and such.. Especially a game as emmense as Final Fantasy 7 or 8...

If you follow the links around the posted story, somewhere there's a link that takes you to a site that has links to a FF8 mpeg... Looks like it may be the opening CG movie. Tells a very small tidbit about the story.

I used Simplesuck for a few things. Slower than shit 90% of the time, they have to analize the source to any CGIs you want to run, at $75 an hour, they'll reserve the right to yank your ass if you go over "reasonable" bandwidth ammounts (I personally know a guy who got the plug pulled because he hit 3 gigs a week), and like you said, use NT.

Rob colocates, his server is sitting on a T3 and his images are on a seperate (geographically seperate) server, over at www.wolfe.net. He probably pays through the nose, and ads barely cover it from what I understand ("Hand Sandwich" (Bologna on hand for lack of bread), anyone?)

I agree that the graphics on the top portion of the main body of the site need to go (the icons), since they're holding things back, but the ads absolutley must stay if this site is to last very long.

Personally I click on ads whenever I can, and actually browse through the resultant site. But there needs to be more ads in rotation, otherwise half my clicks are "not unique" (static IP).

I've been hearing that "copy protection is at an end" every year or two since the late 1980s. I remember when one game on the Apple II had sectors physically burned out with a laser to keep people from copying the disks. It lasted about a month, until someone noticed that the code that looked for the burned sectors could be cut out with a single flipped bit in one subroutine.

The big companies will always tru new schemes, and the hackers will always work their way around it.

While some would argue that 14.99 is way to much to pay for a CD, it is still *reasonable*.

Sorry, but when the equivalent tape version of a cd costs siginificantly less, then it is obvious to me that the CD is NOT reasonably priced. You can't tell me that a static stamped CD is more expensive to produce than a tape with moving parts.

It's also a neat way to see how other people do things. Although I didn't crack games (much:-), I preferred ripping graphics out of things (like Strike Fleet and other C64 games). For me it was always the "How does this thing work?" that kept me poking behind the scenes.

I do believe in in purchasing games when possible, even if it takes a while (took me a long time to find a copy of Darklands). However, if someone can only buy a copy of a game from Japan, I don't see any problem in modifying a US machine to play it (the DVD region encoding bothers me as well). Another issue that's similar is discontinued products. This is very annoying. A firm will refuse to sell a product because it's discontinued, but at the same time they won't give you a copy because they might sell it in the future, it's frustrating. It seems to me that many companies care less and less about the people who buy their products (or who want to buy their products) and more about keeping the bean counters and lawyers happy... sigh. (sorry for wandering)

Dear God, it seems that when a peice of software is widely disseminated, that people can and will find and exploit bugs in it! We better let BugTraq know... and maybe RMS could try to make this work with his "free software" idea... Yeah, that's the ticket.

This is total bullshit as it would require everyone to have a connection to the net at any time. How about if I want to use a program on my laptop in the hotel w/o a net connection? Gimme a break. Yes, piracy sucks but I think that commercial software vendors should just open their eyes and look at The Real World(tm): there is no copy protection that cannot be broken. Period. Closest thing I've seen has been Half Life's scheme with serial numbers checked vs. a central database when playing on the net; other than that, copy protection is just a waste of time that would've been better spent on development and/or (oh my gosh!) bug fixing.

It's not about piracy, it's about being able to play the Japanese version of the game. Message to Squaresoft: We want FF8! Now! We *will* bypass your location chip to play it!

UltraHLE (cool, an exercise in reverse-engineering) MP3 (Cool, lets store all our music on the computer instead of spending all day shuffling CDs) now this (Cool, no waiting until October for FF8) It's not stealing if you *have the CDs* ! (that goes for PSX or MP3)

It is true that the manufacture cost for most CD based home games is way less than $50 or even $15. Unfortunately, the artists, programmers, cgi artists, etcetera are not volunteers and have to get paid too. With the amount of money going into multi-million dollar productions like FF8, they would have to sell approximately 7 zillion copies to break even at $15. (Okay, I made that number up, but you get the point.)

I'm already tired of typing this. For more of my unresearched nonsensical rambling on the subject, go read my comment back on one of the N64 emulation articles.

Well, for me, the good ol' days mainly just involved playing the Zork series on my C64--simply the best games ever. Why? Because they don't contain any graphics whatsoever! Just text--plain text, and good stories:)

A dongle is just a piece of hardware that sits on a serial/adb port to which the program can communicate. Normally they have a sn built into the hardware. The program can query the dongle at any moment in a variety of fashions for authenticity information.

A while is about 1.5 years to write a dongle emulator (the only feasable way to crack a hardware dongle if the program queries it alot and EIAS does alot of queries). Hardware dongles make very very very good copy protection as it takes an extremly high level of sophistication and time to crack one. Im surprised more vendors of high end ($500+) software dont use them as they only add perhaps $20 to the pricetag. (not sure about the actual number but it is small compared to the total price)

I'm not sure about this ('m definitely no expert in this area), but the Mathematica 3.0 protection scheme seems pretty solid. Of course, I've never really tried looking for cracks and such, since I have a legal copy. Does anybody know if a crack for Mathematica exists?

i would hope that one day these companies will get their act together and realize that if they would release these games at the same time instead of making americans / and or japanese wait 3 to 6 months for the next biggest title they wouldnt have to worry about people buying moded playstation/dreamcasts and or modified n64's making the consumer wait is wrong and as long as companies do this they might as well expect this kind of reaction. some people do not want to wait they want it now and they expect that. if they see it in japan why can it not be here just as well ?? translation ? i doubt it i refuse to belive that it takes 3 to 6 months to translate a game especially when the code the game is wriiten in uses english and not kanji! or romanji or whatever. i would expect a small delay due to maybe manual translation for a game like final fantasy . but when companies do not relese games here in america or japan or take there sweet time gearing up for a certains country release all they are doing is adding fuel to the fire for people to go out and buy the jap or american game why wait? and only recently was it that if you wanted the real game and not some censored version of it you had to buy the japenese version thankfully that is slowly going away. still there is a plethora of games that was made by the big 4 gaming (sega,nec,nintendo,sony) systems that never saw the light of day of either a eastren or westren sun due to some ceo who thought that game x just wouldnt cut it here or there....

all i can say is YAY!! another attempt at holding back a highly antacipated title has been defeated if companies want to do something about pirating why not instead of spending money on elaborate copy protection schemes just include intresting tid bits of gaming novelty in with the package so as to make the software really worth more than just a cd maybe a possible collectors item pirates cant copy high quality trinkets that may enhance the games overall value in a gamers collection....

Nowadays, the purpose of copy protection is (1) to insure that millions of middle class mommies and daddies will buy overpriced copies of games for their kids, and (2) to provide an endless source of convenient whining when some fraction of said kids gets fed up with the attitude of said greedy companies and breaks them open anyway.

I'm not even a gamer and I think the whole thing is ludicrous. I thought we cured the PC industry of this scourge in 1983. I *still* have a clear copy of Lotus 1-2-3 version 1.1. When they later unprotected it, they turned me into a lifetime supporter of 1-2-3. I still use it (though I have Excel for those unfortunate people who are stuck sending me Excel 97 things). The world of software did not end -- nay, Lotus did not even become smaller -- when they unprotected 1-2-3.

It is somewhat amusing that when Wing Commander drops in tons of FMV everyone screams and cries and demands the return of "gameplay". But when Final Fantasy does it people call it the greatest game of all time (despite the fact that the dialog and plot suck, the story is completely linear, and the characters are cardboard). Go figure....

I mean the game is in Japanese, so it has a limited audience. And if it is anything like the last one, I wouldn't even want to pirate or buy the next one. And why would you play it in Japanese when it will come out in English and be much easier to read.

Maybe they are doing it so the Connectix emulator would be cirumventing a piracy feature if they made those games emulatable. That is just an interesting thought though. I don't think that it will really hurt Sony in the long run. Unless the people who bought it request a refund because it doesn't work on their emulator...

Also, what is the deal with the people saying I'm first? We aren't in Kindergarden, and the -I called it first- syndrome doesn't really matter here.

Now that I'm all depressed, reminiscing of the days of the community BBS. I miss drawing up ansi graphics for the people with the highspeed 14.4 modems, and chatting with friends who lived down the street, or around the block but whom I'd never met face to face...

Of course the fun part was when you did meet them face to face. Try organizing a party for an IRC chat room:(

I miss Global War (Risk) tournaments and flame wars with the regulars on the bbs everyone told you to stay away from.

The net has it's flashy graphics and it's easier to find all that free software, but there is a serious lack of community. I remeber times when I would log in after going on vacation for a week (having forgot to mention that on the public discussion rooms) and having 3 or 4 people ask me what happened and why I hadn't been online. Now even in IRC rooms where I show up regularly no one notices.:(

Why do the games companies insist on putting in lame protection? The only, thing protection now accomplishes is to annoy legitimate users and keep the pirates in business.

For instance, I have purchased the game 'Thief'. Unfortunately the protection takes advantages of undocumented features and incorrect data that they have planted in the file-system of the CD. Basically what gets returned to the game is undefined in any specs. My CD-ROM drive does not return what their copy-protection is expecting.

Eidos tech support have been zero help as they "are only aware of a few users with this problem" and "we have to have copy protection to protect us against pirates". How many users have to have a problem before it becomes 'worthwhile' to look at it? I know that Thief has been cracked and, from Eidos' attitude, my only option is to get a pirate version. That is what copy 'protection' does.

It has also had another effect. I can no longer be certain that their games will not use undocomented features that my not work on my machine, so I can't take the risk to buy them.

The biggest reason Sony even tries to do country lockout is because their biggest pirates lie across the Sea of Japan and Sea of China.

This protection is intended to keep non-sanctioned countries from stealing/copying millions of dollars worth of games. In Thailand you can buy these things in open air carts on the sidewalks and freeways!

While it is regretable that it makes imports awkward, I don't think that is it's most important goal. For you, perhaps, it is a freedom of choice/import issue. For many others it isn't and involves a fair degree of piracy.

Hey, I want to make a living writing games in two years. Rent the darn thing if you want to try before you buy!

I understand fully not wanting to waste money on games you won't keep/play/enjoy. I really think rental of PC games should be somehow available, and feasible, without further feeding the largely negative pirate circle. Yes, rent a game, have fun, relax, but contribute to the life cycle of the game by paying four 4 or 5 dollars for it at a local Blockbusters! Please!

If startup game companies starve because of pirating, you'll only get Microsofts and Suns making games; you need the small, nimble, innovative, and risky small groups to drive the market!

So, instead of PSX's barcode thingy on the inside ring, you have a hologram. The PSX would have a matching hologram on a lens; a laser would shine through the CD, modulating the beam, and through the lens, modulating it again, producing an encryption key. Shining the laser through the CD hologram produces meaningless nonsense, and through the lens would also create meaningless nonsense.

Thus the convolution(Is this correct? I'm a little weak on the math) of the 2 holograms produces a encryption key, that when applied to the content of the disk as it is streamed of the CD, would become a form of encrypted data. The PSX itself would have a private key that would decrypt the data. Thus each PSX has a unique decrypt key; each game would have a unique half of an encrypt key, with the other half provided by the PSX. The PSX's encrypt and decrypt would be matched, so encrypt/decrypt is possible, but switching lenses with another PSX would render them useless.

One obvious way around that is to copy the holographic media. I'm not sure how one would copy hologram, however. Any experts?

So each game would have its own encoding, with different games (and regions) with their own key. If you had access to the PSX lens, through disassembly, one could try to just crack the key until header data for the CD appeared, but if the key is 128 bit, it should be sufficiently encrypted that it would take longer than the game was worth to crack it. And even so, once you crack it, you would need a modchip that could be updated with cracks, depending on which game was being played. One would also need to do this for each PSX, since each has a unique identity. Thus for every game release, you would need to get an illegal copy without the hologram after someone cracked a 128 bit encryption key with a copy of your holographic lens, maybe a year or so if you are really optimistic and had tremendous amounts of computing power(Is this possible?), and somehow download into your modchip the encryption key. It also assumes that you have already modded the console to ignore the holographic scan, and instead hardcode the decrypt.

If you can copy holograms easily, then the design is moot. If you disassembled a PSX to get at both holograms, then you would have the encryption pattern, but only for one PSX.

Any comments? Pointless waste of computing resources? A decent attempt and method to prevent piracy in Asian countries? AS

You can't get a legitimate PSX game in Thailand. You can get copies from roadside vendors on the freeway(since it is often crawling at 3mph) or sidewalks, or in stores in malls. Only 6 or 7 US dollars a pop.

Why do they pirate so much? Maybe because they can't get a translated copy. So where does the cycle end? If Sony could get a decent profit out of translating for the market, they would, I'm sure. But in the current system, piracy is too prevalent, encouraged, accepted, condoned, and practiced for Sony to even consider spending the money translating. They hope that keeping it in a foreign(Japanese) language, and with some minimal copy protection, they won't get bitten too hard.

There are real reasons for country lockouts; the question I wonder is how/why Thailand even gets PSXs in the first place? AS

Wow. I had forgotten totally Barren Realms, TradeWars, and other door games. I remember ascii and CGI art. I was never part of the boxes, but I had friends who were =)

Ah, that was real fun. I do get some sense of that community in/. I wonder if we could have a poll? I wonder if there could be a/. IRC channel? I'm continually suprised by how cordial(despite disagreeing =) people are when I email them from/. posts.

Sigh. I think I prefer my old 286/386 BBS days to the P2 10bT I have today, for all the community and entertainment it had.

How about, for consoles like PSX, holograms? Each CD has a hologram integral to decrypting the data to a certain phase. Each PSX also has a hologram. When a laser shines through both holograms, a bit pattern(128 bit encryption key) is used to encrypt the data. Without the encryption, the data is meaningless. This also makes the data read into each PSX unique.

Now, taking this data stream, the PSX decrypts it using an internal private key. Something like PGP, I guess.

So to pirate a game on PSX, you could copy the CD and hologram; but you would be limited to playing withing the same region. However, I don't think its a simple thing to copy a hologram.

Each playstation has a unique matched hologram and decrypt key; To actually mod a playstation, you would need to copy the encrypt hologram, match it with the CD(Each game would have a different holographic key, but not necessarily each CD. 10 copies of FFVIII would have the same hologram, but FFVIII and FFVI would not). Then you would have some way to encrypt the data for the PSX to decrypt; however, that would only work for that PSX, and for that game. Each new PSX would need to be done individually, for any game a person wanted to play. Thus each game's key would need to be stored in a modchip on each individual PSX; not 2 would have the same data. The kicker would be that PSXs could be identified, regionally, by their holographic key, so that you would need the internal decrypt key for the PSX, the encrypt key from the PSX, and the encrypt key from the game before you could play an illegal copy. Thus the PSX would be the dongle, and it would need to be modified for every single game that came out, and for every single PSX as well.

It would be relatively simple to disassemble the PSX to get at the unique encryption key. However, once applied, the data is encrypted, and would require some amount of computing power to decrypt, if a 128bit key were used, and that would only get you the decrypt key for that 1 psx. The only way I can think around that would be to copy and replace holographic keys on the PSXs with copies of legitamite ones, and then mod the machines to decrypt them, bypassing the default decrypt inside the PSX.

Ignoring the copy protection means the CD isn't readable; the data is twice encrypted, in a way. The holographic key encrypts it once, and the playstation decrypts it.

If you brute force decrypt the CD, it would take years! Of course, this is very dependent upon the processing power to decrypt and encrypt on the fly.

I'm modeling this on PGP, in which the CD has something like a public key, and the PSX has a private key and a public key. The combination of the PSX's public key and the CD's public key is then used to encrypt the CD, and the PSX's private key decrypts it.

Without any encryption or decryption, the data files are unreadable; they just look like garbage. The CD format itself would remain unchanged I think, otherwise crackers could just crack it looking for standard file header stuff.

Games that should have been bought and paid for are found for 6$ a pop on highways, where traffic can crawl at 3mph, or sidewalk vendors, along with a good teryaki stick, or in malls, stores, and shops. The real loss occurs if/when these things get exported out to other countries. Sony tries to control when and where the CDs go via country codes to prevent the spread of these 'imports'

I know that Japense music is imported in pirate form here. Go to any Asian marketplace, video store, music store, or shopping center, and look out for 'import' CDs with the SM label. They are not original, nor are they legitimate, but they sell 30$ CDs for 15$, and they look, feel, sound quite good. I'm sure games get imported here the same way(heck, a larger profit margin for the same CD! 15$ music or 20$ game on a CD!)

I've never looked for pirate games, because I want to be legit, but I'm sure they exist. Go see Thailand, and then come back here, and tell me how bad it gets...

reminds me of the good ol' days when lord british released ultima 4 (i *think* it was 4) and said that no one would *EVER* be able to bypass the copy protection scheme of the game... i think the warez kiddies of the day had it on every warez bbs the same week it was released.

Seems to me that most piracy is related to overpriced software. I'll comcede the point that many software companies aren't rich as Microsoft, especially not games companies. (Interplay is in serious trouble right now, I heard). But seriously, Microsoft for one is raking the cash in with big rakes, If they cut their prices on Office software, and OS, they might get a few more people buying instead of "stealing." And while I support companies charging what the market will bear, If people are stealing things with such alarming frequency, I tend to think the market isn't bearing it so well.

And, unlike most people, I think they're VERY bad for OSS.. Just think about how many people would use GIMP instead of PS if they had to pay $900 for it.. How many people got w98 just cause they could get it for free? How many people are reluctant to switch to linux cause there is no 3dsmax or maya or lightwave3d for linux.. what about game addicts who warez every major game that comes out? if not for warez, they'd be using linux for sure.

My point is? I dunno.. just sharing, cause I've never seen this brought up:)

you don't honestly think sony could have "won" this battle did you? besides, it's pointless. when you buy a game you don't pay for the CD, you pay for the right to play the game. so, people who actually want to back up their games for safe-keeping are being unfairly targeted in this anti-piracy methodology. how unfortunate. in any case, i back up alot of my games, so i'm happy abou this.

Here, here! Or something. I agree with you. I can understand students pirating these software packages that are expensive in their fees... Students need to learn. However, games are for ENTERFREAKINTAINMENT. Pay for them already. Why do you think [a game] is so expensive? It's because they have to fight piracy. So stop spending your so precious cash supply on pot and beer and buy the damn game already. I mean, really. Sorry, I ramble.

Nonetheless. Games are entertainment. Pay the people who write these things. It's not as easy as it looks.